FSFE Newsletter - September 2011

New Intern surrounded by 800 geeks?

The first day in a new organisation always is quite intensive, many new
people, procedures, so much information. Our new intern Eszter Bako it was even more
intense. She spent her first day with FSFE at the Desktop Summit, surrounded by nearly 800
people talking about strange things such as KDE, Gnome, Qt, GTK, Plasma, Git, QML,
D-Bus, or about how
to build a toaster. For beginners the Free Software community can give a
strange impression.

Beside Eszter joining and Natalia leaving as intern, there are more changes
within our team: Nicolas Jean's
internship has now ended. He was one of the most active people in the web team, and
we are happy that he will remain in our volunteers team as FSFE's webmaster. Diego Naranjo Barroso and Alessandro Polvani
started their internships. Diego already contacted the Spanish Institutions for our
PDFreaders campaign, and Alessandro will do the follow-up in Italy.

Digits to remember: 22-10-11 and 11-11-11

The Nordic Free Software Award is given to people, projects or organisations
in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the
advancement of Free Software. Henrik
Sandklef, our vice-president, asks you to submit nominations by email
until October 22nd.

The award will be announced during the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit
(FSCONS) in Gothenburg, Sweden which will take place from Friday November
11th through Sunday November 13th. The conference is organised by FSFE's
Swedish team, and your editor is responsible for FSFE's "Free Software in Politics" track
there. We are looking forward to see you there. (Fellows will get a discount of
10 EUR on the standard rate).

Something completely different

The importance of promoting Free Software, spreading Free Software
in schools, and what role the computer sciences can play in relating the
messages of Free Software to other institutions and disciplines: Read the latest Fellowship
interview, in which our fellow Richard Shipman shares his thoughts on
these topics.

On Saturday 13th August Free Software
activists came to FSFE’s PDF Readers Sprint in Manchester and found 59
previously unreported adverts for proprietary PDF readers, all of them on UK
Council websites. Check out the report about the event done by Sam Tuke and Chris
Woolfrey from our UK team.

Support Ogg Vorbis by helping our sister FSF to reach 5.000 signatures
for their
petition, asking for This American Life in Ogg Vorbis. Also concerning
Ogg, FSFE's UK team had a booth at the OggCamp2011.

R-DIY Feminism Festival: FSFE will be represented at the DIY Feminism
Festival in Manchester on September 3 and 4, holding events, including talks on Free Software
philosophy, Free Software and women, and an Open Street Map workshop.

With our new intern Diego J. Naranjo Barroso's help Matija prepared the
Free Software and law related links covering links about the the patents
war, Google acquiring Motorola Mobility, and other stories in 1.8.-14.8. and 15.8.-21.8..

Get Active: Software Freedom Day

September 17th is Software Freedom
Day (SFD), a worldwide celebration of Free Software. Its goal is
educational, teaching people why Free Software is the best choice when it comes
to using Software. Organised and coordinated by the Software Freedom
International, SFD invites everyone to participate and take action on a local
level. Our Fellowship
group in Vienna for example invits you to a Software Freedom Party. The
evening will be opened by a talk about legal aspects in Free Software, held by
FSFE's new legal coordinator Matija Šuklje. The groups in Bonn, Hamburg, and Manchester also have
plans.

Contact existing groups to participate in events, or organise your own SFD
activity!